Me & Heartbleed

Although I use a computer all the time when designing my fabrics and quilts, my staff will be the first to tell you that I’m not really a very technical person. So all the chatter about the Heartbleed bug on the internet had me confused and concerned.

Fortunately, I have very good technical people working for me and they were able help me understand what was going on AND take care of the issue quickly. I thought you might be interested in what I learned:

1) Heartbleed is the name given to a bug in a key piece of internet security software that about two-third of websites use — including jinnybeyer.com.

2) The bug was discovered BEFORE any known attacks were made taking advantage of that bug.

3) Most banks and financial services companies, and some super-big online stores such as Amazon, were never vulnerable to Heartbleed.

4) The bug is relatively easy to fix. Many large websites (such as Google) have already made their fixes. We made the fix to jinnybeyer.com last week, on April 11. I knew that we do not store credit card information on our website and was relieved to learn that the company which takes care of that for us was never vulnerable to Heartbleed.

5) Some security experts are suggesting changing passwords on websites once the fix has been made to that site. As a result, we are suggesting to customers who have accounts on jinnybeyer.com that they change their passwords. If you have an account on jinnybeyer.com, you can change the password here. And I guess I’ll be changing passwords on some of my favorite websites, too!

I love what technology brings to my quilting world, and I’ve certainly done my share of shopping online. But I really do wish that we could somehow get only the good from the internet and not all the negative possibilities. That being said, I am grateful to my crack staff who keeps me in the know on these issues and to the people and companies I rely on to keep our website running safely and reliably.